Gypsy Blood (31 page)

Then he forgot about it. He finished university, got a job, got married and forgot about it, except for nights in bed with his wife. She’d always ask him to trim his fingernails. He was forever cutting at her. Cutting at her and dreaming about that woman tied to the bed in her rooming house.

Until the night the gypsy boy had tricked him in going after another woman. And then the gypsy had come out and used his knife. Olaf still felt the pain in his chest, worse than the gypsy’s knife. The water moved the wound, in and out, like soft wet silk, waving goodbye.

He’d always hated the water. When he was younger, a lifeguard had tried to teach him how to swim by throwing him into the deep end of the pool. He remembered that stark bottomless feeling, his feet kicking impotently, the surface so damned far away.

You don’t forget something like that.

He remembered the gypsy killing him. Vaguely, like you might remember bumping against someone on a crowded bus. He didn’t really have any hatred left in him. Death had washed that sort of feeling away.

What he had left was a deep aching need.

His thoughts kept washing back on him, echoes, rolling back and back. He was fading. He’d be gone, if he didn’t do something quickly.

He needed to fuck. He needed the feel of something else against his cock to remind him that he still was close to being alive. He wanted a woman. He had died wanting sex. Now, back from the dead, he wanted it even more.

He humped an octopus, enjoying the feel of the suckers about his anus. They tore ring shaped puckers from the cheeks of his ass and his thighs. He didn’t care. He was dead. He just wanted something to fuck. He fucked the octopus until it ruptured in his hands, like a spongy eight pointed donut.

He tried to catch a fish but the fish moved too fast to catch. It was like trying to fuck an evening shadow. He tried fucking a rock but that was too hard. The leg of the pier gave a little more satisfaction although the creosote scorched his pecker. The water rotted wood gave way beneath his thrusting like the bristles of a hard used woman.

He reached for his cock but in its place he felt a Ouija plenum. He felt the rounded triangle, the balls underneath.

He grabbed it.

Hard.

As he touched it he saw above it, shimmering like a mirage, a woman who looked just like a man. The one who’d stabbed him. The one who’d helped the gypsy escape.

Like a salmon, leaping towards spawning death, Olaf flowed straight up towards Momma, wherever she was.

Talking Pictures

C
arnival rode home in the flower cart.

When he got there he did his best to uncharm Mario, chanting three old formulas in the best Latin he could remember and burning a page of the Holy Bible in the palm of his open hand.

He wasn’t sure if it had worked or not.

“Will he be okay, Poppa? Will your spell leave him unharmed?”

Who can say? It’s been too long since I’ve worked such magic. It’s hard to tell from in here. There’s no light to work with.

“What kind of answer is that? Is he going to be all right, or not?”

Crabby. It serves you right for trying to drink the harbor dry.

“Poppa!”

He’ll be as alright as he ever was. He had a cancer growing next to his belly. Too much borscht, no doubt. If my magic hurried things along, where’s the harm?

Carnival was too tired to answer. He felt like the guts of a road killed cat, dragged in from a rainy monsoon. Morning was breaking through and he hadn’t been to bed yet. This had to stop. He was tearing up his life. Momma didn’t raise her boy to throw away everything he’d built on a pair of pretty fangs.

Every muscle in his body hurt. His heart was banging like a rabid Willy Loman.

Was this what a coronary felt like?

Your heart is fine.

It didn’t matter. He was too damned tired to bother having one.

He could see the front steps of his storefront.

If he could just make it there he’d lay back and watch the stars go by.

Oh look, he had company, somebody sitting on the stairs.

He didn’t see where he came from.

This one must have the ability to cloud men’s reason. Maybe it’s the Shadow. Ask him if his name is really Lamont Cranston? Ask him what he thought of Alec Baldwin?

Carnival ignored Poppa..

The seated figure spoke.

“Good evening.”

He looked at Carnival from the stairs but all the Gypsy could see was the glint of the lamplight upon a pair of thick glass spectacles.

It was the old tattooist.

The old tattooist sat on Carnival’s front stairs.

“Good evening,” the old man replied. “I bid you welcome.”

Why don’t you invite him in? Offer him your neck, and a quart and a half of hot Gypsy plasma?

Carnival wasn’t worried. He recognized who the old man was, right off.

“This is the first time I’ve seen you outside of your shop.”

“I like the night,” the tattooist said with a shrug. “It’s quiet out here.”

“It’s also pretty late.”

“Are you too tired to talk?”

Ha. He knows you a lot, doesn’t he?

“Not at all. It’s good to talk to someone who is still breathing.”

He didn’t ask what Carnival meant by that. Maybe Carnival should have wondered about that, but he’d just talked to the city incarnate, and nearly drowned in the process. A little mystery just didn’t seem all that mysterious to Carnival, right now.

The old tattooist sat there, like he’d been poured out onto the steps. An old man. He looked a little European. He’s wearing a long black coat, like an old time preacher or an undertaker.

“I’m just waiting for a client. He telephoned a little earlier. I gave him directions, but it’s easy to get lost in this neighborhood. Besides, there’s a lot of time to change your mind between the bottom of these stairs and the top.”

“Yeah. I know what that’s like. I’ve seen some clients get as far as the front door, and then turn away, for fear of what I might tell them.”

The tattooist nodded.

“I too. The same thing. We are in similar professions. Both require customers with courage.”

“It’s not that courageous to listen to me gas.”

“On the contrary, I imagine it takes some nerve to look into your future. You must see a lot of customers.”

“I see a few. And you?”

“Not as many as you. I have no signs. I wish I could afford a storefront like you.”

Carnival tried not to laugh, but the thought of someone envying his financial status made him want to laugh.

“I thought tattoos were big with the kids these days.”

The old tattooist looked at Carnival like the Gypsy had offered to show him the inner contents of his lower intestine.

“Yes, popular but not down here,” the old tattooist explained. “Why come down here when you can get a pretty picture tapped on your skin at the mall. You can get it at drugstores and hairdressers and fashion boutiques.”

His face darkened. Carnival could see the lines, of ink and weariness, wrinkles and totem marks each carved as deeply as the other. He’d spent some time in his early years on the carnie circuit. He had seen more than a few tattooed men and women. This was different. This guy’s tattoos ran bone deep.

The tattooist kept on talking.

“These days, any cartoonist with a knitting needle can call himself a tattooist. The new machines, the new designs, they make it easy.”

He waved his hands in the air. Carnival could see the useless need, the wasted motion, painted in the gesture. His hands were poets without ink.

“So where’d you learn your art?”

“Where do you learn anything of value?” the old tattooist asked with a shrug. “I learned it from my father.”

“He was a tattooist as well?”

The old illustrator laughed.

“No, he was a carpenter. He told me to get a trade, to make some real money. I wanted to draw. He told me pictures weren’t worth anything. He said I needed to learn how to make things that would last. So I became a skin illustrator. A tattoo lasts forever, you know. So I was only obeying my father’s wishes. That’s what he taught me. Be obedient. Always obey his wishes.”

“What’d he think of it?”

“I have never seen him again.”

Well, hell, Carnival thought. The two of us have something in common.

We both have a reason to hate our father.

Ouija Nightmares

O
laf’s ghost came streaming right up through the Ouija board, grabbing on to Momma’s pilfered body like a drowning man clutching at an old wrinkled life preserver. Momma felt his cold wet hands tearing at her clothes. Trying to tear her free, to tear her open, to tear her skin. Her sins had found her out.

Bam.

She changed sexes. It didn’t help. Even through the masquerade of the old wife killer’s body, Olaf sensed her innate femininity. Even if she’d been all male it wouldn’t really have mattered. Olaf wasn’t looking to fall in love or form any kind of long standing relationship. It was something darker, something baser than that. Olaf was simply looking to take something to have for his own. He wanted to enter her in every sense of the word.

She felt the eyes of Ouija watching impassively, the sun and the moon gazing up at her as the ghost took hold. The board cared not a whit what happened to her. This was nothing more than her fate, nothing more relevant than that.

Olaf cared even less. She was just something to go through, something to pierce. It was nothing more than temporary satisfaction. He didn’t know he was assaulting the spirit of the mother of his murderer. Truth was, at this point in time he probably wouldn’t have cared. He just wanted to fuck. Sometimes that’s all there is to it, the act of making two into one, for a while. A bonding, a bondage, a bond.

This is the darkness that followed me, Momma thought. Now it has finally found me.

Fucking through the Ouija was like fucking in a sea of alphabet soup. Momma could feel the letters and the numbers of the Ouija wiggling against her skin. All those possibilities, caressing her like an army of blind men fumbling in the darkness. Crawling up her legs and parting them like the pincers of a magnificent giant centipede. It had been some time since Momma had felt this sort of intrusion, and if the circumstances had been different she might have welcomed them. Sex doesn’t end in old age, nor does it end in the grave.

This wasn’t sex of any kind. This was ectoplasmic rape. He pushed his being inside of hers, sheathing himself within her spirit. This was a larger form of possession. No one, alive or dead, welcomes this kind of invasion. Olaf wrapped himself about her, running through the factors of the Ouija, like a Kama Sutra primer. A is for anal penetration, b is for blow job, c is for cunnilingus.

“No, no, no.” Momma called, fighting him as best she could.

If she’d had the time to marshal her powers Olaf wouldn’t have stood a chance. But it had happened so quickly. Penetration was accomplished in the instant it began.

“No, no, no,” Momma screamed.

“Yes,” said Olaf, through the mouth of the Ouija, going on and on with his all day rape.

Momma felt like butter being churned. The pounding assault of the ghost-Olaf was relentless. She was his anvil, and he the blacksmith’s hammer. He beat on her mercilessly. And all the while she kept changing. Back and forth, bam, bam, bam.

Olaf didn’t care. Jim or Momma, he’d fuck them both. He’d tear their skin off hermaphroditically, peeling them down to the spaces between the bone, down to the deepness where all bodies are all the same.

Momma was dead, and none of this should have bothered her. The rape was but another experience for her to live through. He pounded her like waves on a beach, and like a beach she endured it. None of it truly bothered her, except for the eyes. She could feel Poppa’s probing restless eyes, peering from somewhere in the darkness beneath the shadows, watching her closely.

And beneath the eyes of her husband’s she felt her son’s gaze and the feeling of that vision tortured her most of all.

No Rest for the Wicked

T
he mail in Carnival’s shop had grown to a heap beneath the mail slot.

He picked up the heap and sorted it. There were two bills he couldn’t pay and three pieces of junk mail. There was no gold leafed declaration nominating his to the psychic hall of fame. No love letters from any sexually frustrated diamond heiresses. Reader’s Digest hadn’t even bothered to let him know that he might be a millionaire.

Ah, the price of anonymity. Howard Hughes would think you a very fortunate man.